Tag Archives: cognitive science

This is an excellent talk by Alex Faaborg at Google I/O 2013 about cognitive science principles and how they apply to interface design. Here’s a summary of some of the main points and how they could be used to improve your apps:

We can search for objects of the same colour much faster than searching for objects of the same shape [18:26]

We can scan a group of faces for one we recognise in parallel rather than sequentially. This could be taken advantage of in messaging and address book apps, for example [10:13]

Objects in our periphery are recognised much faster than in our frontal field (tiger example in the video). You can put a small notification icon in the corner of the screen away from the user’s focal point and it will still be noticed [6:50]

Colour-deficiency: you can get away with using green and red as long as the contrast is significantly different. Best approach is to test your interface with filtering tools to see how it would actually look (e.g. Photoshop) [13:50]

Our brains are very good at recognising patterns. It’s not necessary to group objects together in a box, just having whitespace between groups will do [3:24]

You’ll recognise a silhouette of an object that just shows its basic geometry faster than you will recognise a more photo-realistic depiction of the object. This principle is used in the Holo icon set [9:10]

Notifications/interruptions wipe the contents of our working memory and make us lose the state of “creative flow” if we were in it. Takeaway: use notifications carefully [22:22]

“Chunking” optimizes for our working memory. Examples are the groups of digits in credit card and phone numbers. Make sure your interface supports these chunks and ignores user-entered whitespace! [21:17]

We make trust decisions quickly and once made they are slow to change, even to the point of us explaining away new information that goes against them. First impressions matter – make sure you have a quality application icon [24:16]

You don’t *have* to be consistent with existing interfaces and interaction paradigms when designing your app. Combining innovation with teaching the user (e.g. with a quick example video) can work well. Example: collaborating on documents via email attachments vs. using Google Docs [31:21]